News

Rivals' Higher Growth Rates Fail To Dent AWS Market Lead

• By David Ramel
• 02/08/2016

Microsoft and Google are boasting higher growth rates for their respective cloud services, but as yet they have been unable to eat into the tremendous market share lead enjoyed by Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), according to new research from Synergy Research Group.

In other words, the 2015 Q4 research data published last week by Synergy shows more of the same old stuff. AWS' full-year 2015 worldwide market share clocks in at more than 30 percent, while No. 2 Microsoft failed to hit even 10 percent, with IBM, Google and Salesforce rounding out the top five providers of cloud infrastructure services.

"The big four cloud operators are continuing to run away with the market," said Synergy analyst John Dinsdale in a statement. "The second tier of operators are either niche players, generalist IT service providers, or companies lacking the scale, focus and investment capabilities required to truly challenge the top four hyperscale cloud providers. This second tier includes Salesforce, Rackspace, Oracle, NTT, Fujitsu, Alibaba and HPE."

AWS maintains the huge market share lead even though other services are posting higher growth rates, as Microsoft's 124 percent year-over-year growth rate almost doubles the 63 percent posted by AWS. Google was No. 2 at 108 percent.

"The four top-ranked companies all grew more strongly than the market as a whole and in aggregate account for over half of the worldwide market," Synergy said.

Outside of the public arena, the research firm said IBM continues to lead private and hybrid service providers in a big overall market that's just getting bigger.

"With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q4, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private and hybrid cloud) are now approaching the $7 billion milestone, with trailing twelve-month revenues exceeding $23 billion," Synergy said. "Total 2015 revenues grew by 52 percent from the previous year."